Most of us rightly desire to be honored and respected by our fellows. Some mortals make studied efforts to gain favor and distinction in society, politics, profession, and business, too often by questionable means. Rivalry, jealousy, competition, injustice, and ill will result. Like all things mortal, personal glory and honor are transitory and far from truly satisfying. They may elude us today, appear tomorrow, and after a brief period fade away. Says Mary Baker Eddy, "It is difficult to say which may be most mischievous to the human heart, the praise or the dispraise of men" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 245).

Christian Science reveals that true sense of honor which the impartial Father of all bestows on each and every individual, regardless of what the material mind may say is his human status. It is the honor which the one God bestows on man by making him His son, or expression. Here is the highest conceivable honor, the honor of being God's representative to evidence forth deific intelligence in thought and life. Thus honored by God, every individual is inescapably honored by his fellow man. Principle so decrees. Every idea of God wholeheartedly honors God, and in so doing honors without qualification all of His ideas who are in Him.

The Psalmist, whose words Paul quotes with approval, says of man, "Thou...hast crowned him with glory and honour" (Ps. 8:5). Now what God has done for man He does not undo, nor does He permit any would-be evil power to undo it. "Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever:... nothing can be...taken from it" (Eccl. 3:14). So the spiritual fact is that the one and only real selfhood of you and me is being continuously honored by God as His own witness or manifestation.

But in human experience this fact may seem far away and abstract when some person or persons persist in refusing to honor or respect us, are unwilling to accord to us the honor we justly should receive. Christian Science shows us how successfully to cope with such a situation.

This Science helps us to understand the comforting truth that our brother's only real identity is that of a son of God, the same as ours is; that God is his one and only Mind; and that God can and does cause him to know man's true individuality as God causes it to be. It is undeniable that the one causative Mind holds only the true concept of each of us, and this is the only concept it can, or does, at any time impart to you, to me, and to our brother. Because God knows each individual only as he really is, each individual is given of God to know himself and his brother as they both are in God's sight. The oneness of Mind enforces this.

So if we are confronted with human situations where we feel we are misunderstood, where we are denied rightful recognition or promotion, where prejudice, false rumor, jealousy, self-will, or ill will seems to cloud our brother's thought toward us, let us not despair. There is a remedy.

The Master certainly received little honor from men. Quite the contrary. Yet no one ever lived who was more justly entitled to be most highly honored. He turned from any longing for mere human honor to the comforting fact he thus stated: "If I honour myself, my honour is nothing: it is my Father that honoureth me" (John 8:54). My Father honoreth me! In this we can be content.

Jesus saw that the human mind could not rightly be accepted as the source of true honor, and that the honor which a human person might accord to himself is valueless. True honor is of the Father's giving, is as certain as is God, and is bestowed forever by God on His own. Whether a few or many mortals honor you or me is of little importance, but the fact that God is perpetually honoring every manifestation of Himself is of eternal importance.

We demonstrate the honor of God's bestowing in the degree we put off any sense of self-seeking for merely personal acclaim and honor, and see that in the same measure we honor God, give to Him first place in our thought and life, His honoring of us by our brother increasingly appears. It coincides with our true being. When we honor God as All-in-all, we see that there is no effect save of His making, and that in His kingdom are our brother and ourself, each constantly given of deific Mind to know the other aright. God's just evaluation of each individual man must be individualized in the consciousness of all men. Where else can it be expressed? Children of the one Father impartially honor one another with the honor wherewith God impartially honors them.

Through our apprehension of the intactness of Love's universal kingdom and of all individual expressions of Life as ever included therein do we lessen and blot out our belief in mortal mind's claim to have made a creation peopled with mortal personalities unjustly honoring or dishonoring one another. No such earth scene is chargeable to God or known to His man.

Let us then master evil's lie that we can be deprived of the rightful honor, respect, and esteem of our fellow man. Let us claim for ourselves our rightful, true, and God-honored status as a son of God, and demonstrate this unselfed sense of being more and more in our daily life. Let us realize that because we and our brother have the same Father, Mind, and Life, and live together as His manifestation in His Love-united kingdom, our brother can only know us aright, and we can only know him aright, each according to the other that sense of honor which is coincident with the understanding and comity by which God unites all men in one grand brotherhood. Man cannot be dishonored by mortals. He is divinely honored by his God, and this honoring which is of Truth's evolving, Mind causes to appear in the consciousness of every one of His children.

Paul Stark Seeley